Hey folks, Running into a weird issue with my self-hosted Lemmy 0.19.4 instance and wondering if anyone else has seen this.

My setup: Lemmy 0.19.4 (Docker) Debian 12 VPS (1 CPU, 2GB RAM) Nginx reverse proxy handling TLS PostgreSQL + Redis working fine (yeah I know, i am f@cking poor)

Issue: Federation is completely broken. After digging deep, and i am talking checking lemmy forum, asking useless AI etc… nothing !! almost mnothing… I found that while the lemmy_server process starts successfully and shows “Starting HTTP server at 0.0.0.0:8536” in logs, nothing is actually listening on port 8536. All API endpoints return 404, including basic ones like /api/v3/site and federation discovery endpoints like /.well-known/nodeinfo/2.0.json. The weird part is that scheduled tasks are running fine (database connection works), but the HTTP server component seems to fail silently after the startup message. No errors in logs whatsoever.

What I’ve tried:

Toggling tls_enabled between true/false Verified nginx config is correct Database has site records and migrations completed All containers are healthy Configuration parsing looks fine

Logs show: Federation enabled, host is mydomain.com Starting HTTP server at 0.0.0.0:8536 [then just scheduled tasks, no HTTP server activity]

Anyone else experienced this? Could be related to resource constraints, but the process isn’t crashing. Feels like a bug where the HTTP server starts but immediately fails to bind without logging the error. Running out of ideas here. Any thoughts or similar experiences would be appreciated.

thanks folks

  • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
    6·
    2 hours ago

    Sounds like a reverse-proxy issue.

    Also, why are you trying to run such a vastly outdated version of Lemmy?

  • azdle@news.idlestate.orgEnglish
    3·
    2 hours ago

    1. Post your actual configs and logs or people will only be able to guess. (Censor any secrets.)

    2. My guess: It’s probably your nginx config.

    3. Why are you using 0.19.4? That version is over a year old.